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The Apple Silicon M1-powered Macs are here, and early reviews of the MacBook Air with M1 are very positive, with benchmarks matching everything Apple promised at launch.
But there’s a downside for those who aren’t fully integrated into the macOS ecosystem: Windows support via Bootcamp is gone.
This is due to a licensing issue, with Microsoft only allowing OEMs, rather than consumers, to install Windows 10 for ARM. When asked if that could change, the company would only tell The Verge that they have “nothing else to share at the moment,” which doesn’t look overly promising.
Now Apple has made it clear that when it comes to future Windows support on Apple Silicon Macs, the ball is firmly in Microsoft’s court. “It really depends on Microsoft,” Craig Federighi, senior vice president of software engineering at Apple, told Ars Technica.
“We have the core technologies to do that, to run their ARM version of Windows, which in turn of course supports x86 user mode applications,” he continued. “But it’s a decision Microsoft has to make, to license this technology so that people can run on these Macs. But Macs are certainly very capable of it. “
If you can’t live without Windows on your Mac, the good news is that Apple has no plans to drop support for its existing Intel hardware. “From a software standpoint, we didn’t branch off macOS,” Federighi explained. “There is no version of macOS for M1 based Macs and a different version of macOS for Intel. They are literally the same installer. It is the same source tree. It’s the same operating system we build every night. This is a unique project and will continue to be the case. “
In other words, any macOS update will work on both systems. “If you buy an Intel Mac today, or if you already own one, you’re going to continue – as you expect – to get free macOS upgrades for years to come,” he said. added.
The interview also covers the genesis of Apple Silicon and its origin. An interesting piece of information, for example, is that Apple never considered simply transplanting the chipset used in iPhones and iPads to Macs. “The M1 is basically a superset, if you want to think about it compared to the A14,” Federighi said. Computer-specific features like Thunderbolt, external displays, and the best GPUs required something tailor-made.
“There are a lot of features that we designed in M1 that were Mac requirements, but these are all superset capabilities of what an app compiled for the iPhone might expect.”
You can read the full interview with Federighi, Greg Joswiak and Johny Srouji at Ars Technica.
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